Making better wine with the Internet of Things

How do you ensure the best possible crop when you’re producing bottles of wine that sell for over £1,000?

When JoTo Systems were asked by a collective of local vineyards in Coonwarra, Australia to maintain the vineyard monitoring solution that was in place, their founder Tony Smith found a solution that was in serious need of an update

Tony explained “We were given a number of arduinos and SD-cards, some of which were seriously water damaged. We had to drive 4 hours each way once a month to collect the data from the SD cards and then provide the analysis back to the vineyards in a format which was easy for them to understand.”

The previous sensors

“The devices were running on batteries charged by solar panels but, even in the South Australian sun, we were lucky if they stayed charged for more than 24 hours at a time. It was clear a long-term, power efficient, real-time solution was needed, so we started to turn to the Internet of Things.”

Mockingbird Consulting were able to provide us with a private LoRaWAN solution including data storage and visualisation, allowing us to focus on developing and deploying the sensors.

Tony Smith, Director at JoTo Systems

The new dashboard created by JoTo Systems to monitor the vines in realtime.

JoTo Systems had already installed and configured a LoRaWAN Gateway to send data to The Things Network, however they required a managed platform that included not just the LoRaWAN Infrastructure, but metrics storage and analysis software, and that’s when they turned to Mockingbird Consulting for help.

Leveraging Mockingbird Consulting’s relationships with Hashicorp, InfluxData, and the wider open-source community, we were able to provide a LoRaWAN stack based on loraserver.io and a metrics platform running InfluxDB and the Grafana open-source dashboarding platform.

Once the platform was in place, we talked JoTo Systems through reconfiguring their gateway to point to the new infrastructure, and watched as the data started to roll in.

What’s next for JoTo Systems?

Tony Smith explains “We’ve already solved the power issues, and have designed custom cases for the sensors that are watertight to ensure we don’t see the same damage that affected the previous sensors. We’re now going to look at installing GPS sensors into the devices so that we can map the vineyards and track the changes in temperature across the vines, and even start to look at how we might monitor what’s going on inside the vine itself.”

At Mockingbird Consulting, we’re looking forward to working alongside the project as it moves to the next phase, helping Tony and his team design dashboards and visualisations for their customers, and enabling the wine-makers of the Coonwarra region to create even more impressive wines.

Mockingbird Consulting is registered in England and Wales. Company Number 10488438.